


In Memoriam Mei

by CorpseBrigadier



Category: Final Fantasy Tactics
Genre: Anal Sex, Blood and Injury, Dubious Consent, Enemies to Lovers to Enemies With Some Conflicted Feelings, First Time, Hand Jobs, Hate Sex, Heavy-Handed Foreshadowing, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Religious Guilt, Sieges, Starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:01:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28728528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: In the midst of the Northern Sky's campaign against the Death Corps, two men recall a shared past.
Relationships: Wiegraf Folles/Original Female Character(s), Zalbaag Beoulve/Wiegraf Folles
Comments: 7
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> An expansion on the basic idea outlined in the little ficlet ["Strategem;"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27751642) also another attempt to make a yearly tradition out of writing completely self-indulgent, angsty fic about my OTP for my birthday.
> 
>  **Note on Names:** I freely mix PSX and PSP names without remorse.
> 
>  **Note on Content:** The consent is exceedingly dubious at points; clear requests to stop sexual activity are ignored even if both parties end up enthused about things. Alcohol is also involved in one occasion. There are also just a lot of passing mentions or allusions to various forms of sexual violence (rape in warfare and the exploitation of vulnerable minors in particular). The work assumes Catholic-typical levels of institutional homophobia on the part of the Glabados faith and features characters feeling very guilty or feeling very unguilty in light of it. There are also passing references to cannibalism, the perils of childbirth, and canon-typical disregard for innocent people being shot.

Zalbag closed his eyes, and the world seemed to float with him—with the snow and the clouds and the great bird upon which he rode. Everything drifted north. A day of fasting had left him with a nervous, almost giddy euphoria, and he had tried as best he could to savor it. He had long ago discovered that the keenness of denial had its own pleasures.

They were less than a day off from Zeakden, and he was not yet thinking as to what they would do once they got there. Unlike Dycedarg, he had gotten to where he was by assuming that plans would go awry more often than they would stick to the course imagined for them. He supposed it made particular sense today; the end to the campaign had no good outcome that he could imagine. Scouts had given conflicting reports as to whether Wiegraf had circled back towards the windflats, and Zalbag still did not know if he could chase him there. Something bristled in him to think that all of this should happen at the fringes of Barrington’s territory, and he suddenly felt no more suited to his rank and position than he had as a boy of eighteen.

Zalbag opened his eyes, looking ahead into the deep grey of the valley. They’d passed this way back then too: so many Northern Sky gallants sent to bolster the Weapon King's defenses. Most of his men had been as overeager for glory as he had been. The thought that they might drive Romanda back across the sea as their fathers had chased Devanne’s men back to Viura was a very romantic one. None of them had really understood what it was like to have the enemy on their own soil. They were all westerners; none of them had yet been in a siege. Zalbag wondered if any of the Dead Men, who seemed to turn up and seemed to die nearly everywhere, had weathered one before.

The Wiegraf of ten years past certainly hadn’t.

Somebody called out to confirm that they were nearing Fovoham’s borders, and Zalbag shouted his acknowledgement. He spurred his bird on harder. 

The dull shape of another hill came into sight, and he thought of the last act he'd undertaken prior to leaving Igros: of asking for the sacrament. He could hear himself even now, voice low, as he told the old man that there were sins he could not afford to risk dying in.

Everything was strange. It was probably the hunger. The present, the past, the confession joining the two: they all blent together. It was the opposite of what he’d wanted. He had wanted that the priest should hear him out and that everything would stop and be unmade. How else could he break with so many years of silence and then set himself on the road north an hour later? There should have been some reckoning—some transformation. The credo in old Ikoku, the sound of his staggered breath, the light that seemed cold through all the blood-colored glass of the chapel window: it should have been _clean_ and full of finality. It should have severed him from the past and from the man who haunted it.

Zalbag looked behind him to see that they were now out of sight of the Gulg. He could still hear himself giving that account, and none of his words carried with them the import of those acts described. He might have named each incident in detail that would take the whole day to unfold, and it would not have given them their shape. Even now, even having recited the terms of his absolution and taken his penance, he grappled with how God could possibly forgive him for what he would never be able to explain.

Something in his flesh, writ deeper than his thoughts, ached beneath his armor and gambeson, and he laughed a little as he recognized the frosted shape of some wreckage of stonework just off the horizon. He knew it as the remnants of a little chapel that Romanda had put to the fire, and a decade’s worth of winters had not seen it topple.

He was moving steadily towards where Wiegraf Folles must be, and he knew with an increasing fatalism that neither of them would escape one another.

~~~

_The sky over Riovanes had looked like old parchment, yellowed by the smoke of summoners’ arts. It had been twenty-eight days, and there had been no word from the east. Fighting was going poorly, but it was sporadic enough not to matter. The Romandans were learning to wait. Rationing was going poorly as well, however, and Zalbag had been too often charged with making the decisions Barrington ought to have made. He did not like to have the final word on what his men were allotted and what must go to the cowering Fovohamese: to the widows and war orphans. It did not seem his place to divide the loaves and make the tally. Most of the knights in the city were Hokuten then, and he only realized later that it had pleased the Grand Duke to make them a scapegoat for Fovoham’s privations._

_The Dead Men, as they always had and always would, complicated everything. If the Northern Sky had been reticent in cutting too deeply into Riovanese stockpiles, it was not so with the commoner’s army, and there was no recourse anyone had but to appeal to him. The siege had lasted into August by then. People had been sick with the heat, and what bloodshed there was left its rot upon the air, reminding everyone that the crows would have meat if nobody else would. When Zalbag finally brought his grievances to Commander Folles, it should have seemed the natural course of things that they would come to blows._

_They had not been friendly upon greeting, and the conversation as to the Dead Men’s “allocation” of city supplies did not leave either better disposed to one another. There had been a strange clarity as things went sour, and Zalbag had realized that all his talk would change nothing—that within Riovanes the forces of rank and title had already broken to the extent that he could not expect to be obeyed. Zalbag still needled Wiegraf anyways and still took great offense at its futility._

_Wiegraf had told him at great length how little anybody needed the oversight of some untested child whose only claim to authority came from his father’s name. When Zalbag had drawn his sword, the only response it gained him was laughter._

_“Are you going to run me through, then?” His pale hair was a mess in the summer heat. “Who would lead the Dead Men for you? What would you do, suddenly saddled with another gaggle of western knights you haven’t a clue how to manage?”_

_Zalbag had cuffed him then. He hadn’t said any of the myriad oaths and minor blasphemies that had fired through his brain, but it had been an instant in which he broke with reserve and allowed anger to master him. Whatever relief he might have had of it did little to prepare him for Wiegraf’s tackle. He’d been knocked against the wall before he could brace for it. He’d never been much of a boxer._

_They had been in one of the rooms at the keep: some place far from the fighting that had been more often cluttered with courtiers than it had been with knights. Zalbag had a momentary, aimless worry that the blood from his split lip might stain one of the Grand Duke’s tapestries. When it registered that his sword had clattered to the floor, he did not dive after it._

_He did not leave off in kicking against Wiegraf either. There was something almost joyful in having the dullness of so many days’ waiting cut off with violence. The blood that lay heavy on his lips was its own sort of meal to a hungry man. He fought wildly after that, and it did not serve him well—although he managed to get another few blows in before he was kicked into the edge of some piece of Riovanes’ ironwork._

_His side throbbed. His head swam. When Wiegraf had him against the wall again, he could feel the other man’s heartbeat racing against his own, their bodies pressed close as he braced his arm against Zalbag’s neck. Wiegraf told him in a harsh whisper the that he hoped Barrington would sell him to Romanda for a truce—that if he had such an eye to economy he could damn well buy their lives with his pride—that he hoped they’d parade him through the capital and let the Empress’s guard find some means to quit his tongue of its sanctimony._

_Even in the thick of the summer heat, Wiegraf’s breath had burned against his face. Truth be told it seemed some strange alchemy in the air between them—more so than anything that had been said—lent Zalbag the rage to cast him off and set upon him again. He managed to push him to the floor a little ways after._

_There were—perhaps—any number of ways the fight might have gone that would have turned their course another way. Had one blow or fumble happened otherwise, it might not have ended as it had: with Zalbag straddling his opponent on the cold marble of Barrington’s castle, watching as the blood dripping from his own battered face fell stark upon Wiegraf’s pale lips._

_When he looked back upon it later, Zalbag would tell himself that there could have been no precursor in that moment to the month that followed. There was no sin beyond violence in the configuration their bodies took then. He knew how that fight had ended. There had been no embrace. There had been no caresses. They had hated one another with the honesty of desperate men._

_In that moment though, as Wiegraf gave himself over to more mocking laughter, it had felt like sin, and during a desperate winter morning’s confession to Igros’ palsied chaplain, Zalbag would start his account with that afternoon. He would try without success to explain how it seemed that all the crimes committed between the two of them had been compacted at that instant—that there had been some bargain struck: a strand of red connecting one mouth to another as if to bind them in a kiss._


	2. Chapter 2

As poor Tansa did her best to sew up his shoulder, Wiegraf considered that it was a very stupid thing for him to die like this, caught in the hills along Fovoham and hounded by the Northern Sky. It was—of course—a stupid and dismal prospect to die anywhere, but after all the miseries that had been piled upon him, it seemed a final kick to the teeth to die on any pile of dirt that Gerrith Barrington could lay claim to... and to die at the hands of the Hokuten besides.

Wiegraf shook as Tansa tied off the last bit of catgut, and he didn’t respond when she asked if she should get him one of their remaining potions. He thought for a moment that if he were to speak to her like a reasoning human being it would drive him again to weeping. It would only be a handful of miles that separated them, but Wiegraf thought it a great betrayal to die in Fovoham while Miluda lay rotting in Gallione: more so than the betrayal of bothering to die or to live at all.

He moved his arm a little and told himself it didn’t hurt. Eventually Tansa returned with a corked vial, which she deposited into Wiegraf’s hand. He barely kept his grip on it, and she folded his fingers around it for him. She did not stay. He did a good job of not breaking down again even when there would be nobody to see him do so.

Miluda, wherever she was, would have something cutting to say about this miserable end they were facing; he was sure of it. She would remark on how he oughtn’t have leaned so heavy on Gustav or how he ought to have figured Gustav’s game out earlier; she’d point out that he shouldn’t have let Golagros take charge of anything more complex or dangerous than scraping the cookpot. Perhaps, if he wanted to imagine her as particularly biting, she’d remark that he’d gotten the whole of House Beoulve mixed up terribly in terms of how he should handle them.

_“If you’d only managed to fuck the one with the brains or kill the one with the sword back then, this might have been at an end months ago.”_

The real Miluda, whose body may well be feeding coeurls by now, had never said it—but he wouldn’t have faulted her if she had. He deserved to have the indiscretions of his youth thrown in his face. Even now, knowing that he was rapidly running out of decisions left to him, he thought it would have been good for somebody else to remind him that Zalbag Beoulve would not treat him with any sentimentality.

He stood up, looking out from his tent flap towards the ragged brush of the hills outside. He wondered if his most recent failure—beyond trusting Golagros with something bigger than a cookpot—was that he had directed his men to stab the Beoulve who _wasn’t_ directing military operations against them.

The camp was in a lamentable state. Almost anyone with a head for putting things together was dead by now. They had been eating small game and tree bark the past few days, and he refused to let himself feel his hunger. Wiegraf heard somebody playing a flute of some sort: a melancholy tune that had been popular in Lesalia a decade or so prior. He hadn’t the will to tell whomever it was to damn well stop betraying their position by playing it. They were all moving to the same terminus now, and if someone wanted to mourn that, who was he anymore to intervene.

He closed the flap and lay down on the earth then. Looking upward at the grey canvas above him, he tried to let his vision drift to some point where there was nothing he could fix upon.

Miluda had been thirteen during that horrific summer, and he’d never asked her what she’d known. He wondered if he should have. She had weathered more than he had at that point, really. The Romandans had landed in the spring, and she’d had the wherewithal to trek the five leagues from where their village lay burnt to tell him about it. She’d managed at Riovanes better than men twice her age. She’d been marching with a sword the year after. Why should he think his little sister to be incapable of recognizing his idiocy?

Wiegraf closed his eyes and remembered that day when it seemed half the countryside was folding itself behind the city walls. The Grand Duke had made a speech about Fovohamese resilience. The Khamja had made some martial show or another: their red and gold ornaments flashing in the July sun as they waved their hooked bronze swords. Wiegraf had misgivings even then—even before there was a single Romandan flag on the horizon. He’d wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to pull the Dead Men together and make up some excuse to push south. They’d be no better off dying at Igros than dying at Riovanes, but at least they’d have better company. The Fovohamese were not at all guarded in their disdain for their southern neighbors.

He’d tried to keep calm though. He'd been very young, and he had wanted to seem brave. It was only when the gates finally closed that Miluda had told him she was afraid. She hadn’t wept or prayed or given herself over to any of the excesses of fear, but she was suddenly obvious to him as the child she was.

Wiegraf had given her as many bold lies and reassurances as he could after that. He had insisted to her that neither of them would die at Riovanes.

He almost chuckled to think that of all those promises he’d broken to her, that one had held. Even after every plan went wrong and every idiotic misfortune had loosed itself upon them, both of them would die miles away from that tomb of a castle. He told himself that whatever patch of field or foxhole they’d hunt him to, it would not be that awful darkness into which he would fall.

Wiegraf opened his eyes again and watched as his breath fogged the air above him. Somewhere, the music of the flute had died off. 

There was a call from one of the girls watching the ridge, something like the low whoop of a grouse. Wiegraf pried himself up to standing; it was excruciatingly painful.

As he walked towards the open camp, he wondered if it hadn’t been another piece of mismanagement on his part to get clipped in the first place—if he hadn’t brought the injury upon himself by refusing to recognize which Beoulve it was with whom he was dealing.

Wiegraf called to Ariadna for his sword, hoping she’d set it to rights at least as well as Tansa had set the rest of him. There was a dizzying realization that he might well meet with the General of the Northern Sky in a little while.

  


~~~

  


Zalbag had tried to be kinder to the squire out of Limberry than the field had been to him at his age; he reminded himself that boys in these times had been reared for a world at peace. Even when Ordallia had marched as far as Lesalia’s borders, nobody in the academies was being trained up to spend decades of their life off in the east. In this new era then, he supposed that boys were wont to be freer in their speech and less cautious with their words: the natural consequence of hailing from a generation who would have more space to make mistakes and live through them. 

All that being said, Zalbag did not like Algus Sadalfus very much. He did not—in fact—like him at all, and this was not in any way helped by how very very hard Algus had been trying to make himself likeable.

They were not moving at a leisurely pace by any means, and this made the amount of conversation that Algus could pack into any moment they were at rest all the more impressive. Despite having spent most of last autumn in Limberry proper, Zalbag had somehow learned more about the province over the course of the past four hours than he had in all those long months of having Elmdor glower at him.

He tried his best to remain patient throughout it all—through the boy’s discussions of the war, through his accounting of the history of his own house, through his speculations as to the motivations of the Marquis and his relations, through his opinions of the perpetual inclement weather that plagued his district, through his glorious retelling of the very campaign that Zalbag had been heading less than a year prior. Patience was an easy enough virtue to cultivate, Zalbag told himself: it largely consisted of being able to remain quiet.

It was only when Algus’ histories finally caught up to the present that things took an ill turn. Feeling that the day’s conversations had put them on familiar terms, the boy turned to him and asked very pointedly about the mission.

“Do we plan to kill all the rogues to the man, ser? Is Folles going to die on the field or do we need to take him back to Igros to be made example of.”

Nobody else riding alongside them would have put a question like that to him. Nobody else had the presumptuousness to imagine he would give a response before a decision had been made.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he said bluntly. “I’ll tell you my decisions when it’s your place to know them.”

Algus fell into a humiliated silence. Zalbag called for the men to pick up their pace again, recalling how Wiegraf _had_ been at Igros last year, recalling how there was that brief moment where the war _had_ been over and men weren’t yet fighting over what the crown could no longer provide. 

It seemed like far more than a year. Everyone had been drunk. Singers were playing until well past the evening bell. He recalled Dycedarg, still in mourner’s black, clapping along to the rhythm of a tourdion. 

When he caught Wiegraf in the midst of it, there was the strangest sense that time had looped back on itself: that as the two of them approached one another in the upper hall, it might well have fallen that they should come to blows. Even without reason this time. Even without cause.

What had happened had been very mundane. Wiegraf had offered his condolences as to his loss and his congratulations as to his new position. Zalbag had thanked him.

It had been such a plain and completely unremarkable interaction; Zalbag had thought for a moment that it might almost set a seal on the past. If both of them refused to mention or allude to the siege of Riovanes, it must mean that nothing between them had happened there. 

That illusion broke the moment they clasped hands in parting. If skin and sinew has a memory, that small gesture carried with it all of the ghosts of their mingled flesh. Zalbag said nothing—felt nothing—in the moment, but later that night, when the sky was full of gold rockets and dragon’s eggs, he was absent from the crowds.

He had spent the rest of the night in fervent prayer, bowed before the altar of the manse’s small chapel until the dark hours before the dawn sounded with birdsong. He had prayed again and again that he might be freed of so many recollections, and in doing so he had further burnt each of them into the substance of his brain.


	3. Chapter 3

_They fought again—of course they fought again. They had been two boys saddled with responsibilities that were beyond them, and there had been no place to vent their despair save for one another. If Zalbag did not recall Barrington’s many speeches as to what a pity it was that Gallione had sent him more children to tend, Wiegraf surely did. Rationing continued to go poorly. Fighting tapered off into the dread of a stalemate. The Dead Men were more or less in line when one of the Hokuten started some mischief with a local girl. Tensions spilt over then. The Fovohamese did not make divisions when it came to who had wronged them, and all westerners felt themselves the recipients of the same hatreds. It had pained Wiegraf to recognize that the differences between commoner and knight should be effaced by so much collective loathing._

_All throughout it, Zalbag remained stalwart in being a sanctimonious prick who didn’t see the inanity of trying to count beans and keep order in a place where everyone was a day or so away from their grave. The man was hanged—as well he should have been—and Zalbag immediately went back to pestering the Dead Men over minutiae as if he hadn’t just hopelessly complicated everything. He’d been quibbling over issues of_ sacrilege _two days out, as if he hadn’t just sent a man to the gibbet and confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions about all of Gallione’s sons: something about Smyton’s pig-headed suggestions that they find a priest willing to quit with some sacramental oil for their bow locks._

_Wiegraf had been quite flatly terrified in the wake of the first scuffle, wondering all the week long if he were going to be called to account for it with his neck while Miluda was left to the mercy of the city at large. When absolutely nothing happened, however—either to him or to his men—the incident made him bold. If all it took were a few bruises to get Zalbag to back down, Wiegraf considered that somebody ought to be liberal in bestowing them._

_He hadn’t—of course—gone to confront Zalbag that time with an aim to strike him any blows, and when all was said and done, none had been struck. Still, it would become very evident in the days to come that whatever suicidally foolish impulse had seized him during that first quarrel had returned to direct him into deeper and far more terrible depths of idiocy._

_None of the preliminaries of what had happened were in any way surprising. Zalbag remained unwavering. Wiegraf became hot-headed. The two of them fell to shouting._

_This time, however, Wiegraf caught Zalbag in his arms before things could progress beyond a few shoves. He pushed the younger boy's head against the flat oaken table of the room and leaned against him, thinking to pin him into place while he proceeded to tell him off._

_Wiegraf, for all he grew to be very fond of making speeches, had little recollection of the one he made then. He told Zalbag a great many unkind things; he knew that. He told him he was an overpious, self-important fool who had obviously never been made to reckon his actions outside of somebody else’s orders. He told him that both his heavenly and earthly fathers weren’t going to come save them any sooner for making himself so thoroughly unlikeable in their joint names. He told him something of the grim realities of sieges and of the expendability of second sons and how much everyone hated him: how every man, woman, and beast in Riovanes wanted nothing to do with him._

_“Ajora’s cunt. No wonder you’re so keen for a fight. It was probably the only way you can get anybody to set their damned hands on you.”_

_It was that utterance he recalled—the one that had given way to Zalbag going motionless beneath him, his ragged breath dropping off as sure as if he’d just been throttled._

_“Did I strike a nerve?” He’d run a hand along the inside of his thigh then. “Have you been ruining the lives of dying men for weeks because even with your name and your station, nobody will give you a parting fuck before the end of things.”_

_As Wiegraf pressed his hand between Zalbag’s legs, he was completely uncertain as to how he should feel to find him hard. He was completely uncertain as to just about anything—least of all why he had done such a thing. He imagined he could feel something of the boy’s expression through the burning heat of his skin and the sudden gasp that set his breath back into motion. Wiegraf rocked against him slightly then, face hot as he fondled Zalbag through the fabric of his trousers._

_Zalbag did not tell him to stop, not even when he tugged apart his laces, not even when he pulled his prick free and began to stroke it, thumb feeling about the tip of its crown as he began to squeeze. It was only when he eased the weight of his body off of him and moved to roughly kiss the side of his neck that Zalbag choked out a "stop."_

_Wiegraf ignored him and kissed him harder for it, using his free hand to pull him upright against him as he buried his face against his throat._

_Zalbag gasped hard as he told him to stop again. He invoked God or the saints or possibly even the practical perils of doing what they were doing in one of Barrington’s offices._

_He was very unconvincing as he did so._

_When Wiegraf turned his face to kiss him on the lips, he thought it strange that he should be kissed back—not realizing until that moment how much he’d wished that somebody would touch him in this hell they were in._ He _hadn’t been with anyone—man, woman, or what have you—not since they’d left the outskirts of Gariland—not since before the Romandans had even made landfall._

_“We could have saved one another quite a number of bruises this way, you arrogant fuck,” Wiegraf said when their lips next parted._

_Zalbag tried to kiss him again after that, and Wiegraf had dodged him. He’d picked up his pace in the meantime, running his hand over the length of Zalbag’s shaft in long, hard strokes._ _He persisted though in meeting and returning what caresses he could: as Wiegraf stroked him, rutted against him, moved to whisper obscenities in his ear._

_“Saint’s breath but you’re aching for it. Was this what you were trying to thrash out of me before? Did you want me to push you to the ground and make a wreck of you then too? Did you want me to ruin you beyond anything Romanda might do?”_

_Zalbag had made only a stifled moan when he came, spilling over Wiegraf’s hands as his body slackened. It had been clear the moment afterwards that he wished anything but that Wiegraf should continue to hold him, but he did not resist the fingers that wrenched into his short cropped hair or the mouth that trailed more hard kisses down the side of his neck. When they finally did part, Wiegraf had done nothing yet in the service of his own pleasure; his ardor had cooled enough to recognize that he had done something very wretched and phenomenally foolish._

_Zalbag said no farewells from where he lay half-collapsed on the table, and Wiegraf did not wait for them. The standoff almost broke that day. Five of his men fell when the Romandans tried to surge the southern wall._

_When he found his way to Miluda in the late evening, he discovered that she had been set to mind a water bowl—checking the surface for ripples in the hopes they could suss out sappers. He’d scolded her over something or another—for having failed to tell him where she was or for having let herself be alone. He had again and again stressed to her that there were men who would have bad designs on a girl of her years, and he had never listened to her firm “I knows” as he ought. After whatever lecture it had been, she’d told him that he could go hang himself so far as she was concerned, and they were on the outs for a full half of an hour until she came to drag him to supper._

_When they ate together that night it had been at a time when there was still bread enough for them both to have a slice. There’d been meat even a week prior, and Miluda had been boiling the bones ever since with whatever common weeds she could scavenge: chickweed and lambs’ foot—the sort of stuff that tasted entirely of grass. The meal had been almost unremarkable. They were housed in an inn that the Dead Men had been occupying ever since the first week of the siege, and were it not for the scent of powderworks and magic outside, Wiegraf could almost pretend they were not so far removed from the days when they had a home._

_She could not have known what he had done, and he could never have told her. When they parted for the evening, Wiegraf did not sleep, alternating restlessly the whole night between thoughts that he had greatly wronged General Beoulve’s son and thoughts that he should have wronged him more thoroughly._


	4. Chapter 4

The Hokuten were pushing north like madmen now, and Zalbag did not want to think about poor Tietra Hyral. He had not wanted to think about her before they had set out north, and he had almost succeeded. He had almost escaped thinking about what the men holding her might do to her, about how easily Alma might be in her place, and about the sort of man he must be to consider neither of those factors in his plans. He had almost been able to section off his brain and reduce her to a great nothing by the time they’d reached Zeakden—by the time he had given that idiot boy the order to shoot and had hoped he’d have the decency to hit the bandit and not the girl. 

His bird reeled under him as he hit a full gallop. One of the knights on his back gave a shout. He tried to tell himself that innocents always died in any war—that maids as young as that were not exempt from any ugliness, and that Ivalice had long found herself buoyed up by her children’s blood. He told himself that he could not reckon out the force behind their actions any more than he could measure the motives of the arrow itself. He had been given his orders and his priorities, and he had carried them out.

Pressing onward, he tried to turn his brain to other things: to the steam coming off their birds’ bodies, to the smell of damp earth and grass underlying the snow, to all those crimes upon which he had fixed his thought prior. This is how he had dealt with sin when it had first truly come for him; he had tried to counteract its hold by running to embrace it. He had let himself fall entirely once he had faltered.

He did not think of Tietra Hyral when he recalled how he had conducted himself back at Riovanes; how he had offered almost no protest as Wiegraf had first taken hold of him; how it had fallen from there that he should make his body quite the same oblation to Wiegraf’s lusts as it must be to Romanda’s arrows. He did not think of her when he recalled his wild rationalizations as to how each coupling would be a spur towards staying alive—how he had feared to die in sin. He did not think of anything as they descended into the big pit of a valley that marked the edge of Gallione’s borders. It was only in the sink of the charge that he recalled—clear as daylight—how he had first crawled to where Wiegraf was quartered and confronted him after a sleepless night.

The sky turned dull red around him. The sharpness his recollections was in no way blunted by the panicked shout of a lieutenant telling him that Zeakden was burning. 

He rode even harder even as the man slowed in the expectation they might stop.

“Zeakden is behind us, you fool—the road ahead’s not burnt!”

Nobody had responded, and in the little space before their rush to follow, Zalbag imagined himself alone, cutting like a comet across the vale, unencumbered by anything that could hinder its descent.

  


~~~

  


_Zalbag had not prayed about his decision before making it. He had feared to raise a voice towards heaven then, uneasy at the thought of attracting its notice. He had feared to even let his thoughts drift towards God. During the fatal surge, during Barrington’s haranguing, during his vain, silly watch for some messenger’s bird to alight from the dimming sky, Zalbag had carried with him a morbid terror of divinity. He had stopped himself short at every hope for the Saint’s intervention._

_Perhaps, had he prayed, it might have gone differently. Perhaps he would not have fallen farther. Perhaps he would have died in his repentance and never have had to live through ten years of unease._

_None of that had happened. He had taken off the icon he wore beneath his shirt, and he had lain on his bed without undressing. He had tried to direct the course of his breath and ignore the phantom impression of a body at his back. He had tried to dream._

_And then, after pretending for many hours that he might sleep, he had gotten up, thrown a cloak around his shoulders, and walked through the city to where he had been told the leader of the Dead Men slept._

_When Wiegraf answered his knocking, it had been clear he was apprehensive. When Zalbag wordlessly draped his arms around him, both boys went ashen as ghosts._

_Wiegraf had stared at him. He said nothing when Zalbag asked if there was anything unfinished between them._

_It moved very quickly after their lips met. Zalbag might have gasped out another “stop” at some point, but he had known it would not be heeded. He had been embraced. He had been led upstairs. His skin had burnt hot as Wiegraf pushed him onto a thin canvas mattress stuffed with straw. He remembered being asked if he couldn’t find any proper knights to fuck him._

_Zalbag had helped Wiegraf to undress him. He remembered pulling off his shirt over his head and unlacing the top of his trousers as Wiegraf tugged them off of him. When he lay there, stark and eager in the morning twilight, he was very still._ _Wiegraf stripped off his tunic and climbed atop him, kissing him savagely as the straw crunched beneath the weight of their two bodies. Perhaps there had been the shriek of some mouse caught within the palette; he remembered it happening one time or another._

_Zalbag ached as he felt Wiegraf grab for his prick again and bring it together with his own, stroking them both for a while as they rocked themselves together. He kept thinking that if maybe he were to bolt from the room there could still be some space for penitence—he could find some cleric or another and disburden himself of this. He could say some foolish thing to get Wiegraf hanged and relieve himself of temptation._

_They carried on like that for a while—wordlessly, hungrily. Zalbag had bit into his lip to keep from moaning. Eventually Wiegraf pulled away and headed to a little cabinet across the room,_

_“You want something to drink?” he asked quietly. “It’s gone sour, but it gets the job done.” He’d poured him a glass of something—wine he thought._

_Zalbag had quaffed it all in one go. Wiegraf had laughed at him again._

_“Ajora’s tits, maybe we should leave off if you need all that to stomach me!”_

_“It’s fine.”_

_“You certain?”_

_He hadn’t been. He’d nodded, but he had felt at each instant that he was doing something terrible and irrevocable. As he laid back again and Wiegraf climbed back onto him, he felt the whole time as if he were the one who was forcing matters, as though it were his hands pushed against someone’s wrists and his mouth buried in another man’s neck. His erection burned as it dragged across Wiegraf’s sweat-slicked belly, and he’d thought of how he had still had no word from the east: not even when they were nearly a month into the siege. Perhaps one of the Duke’s doves had been taken; the man seemed to ask after messages each day as though Zalbag could bid his father’s words fly back to him. Perhaps the fighting was thick elsewhere..._

_He’d looped his arms over Wiegraf’s neck and pulled him hard against him, kissing him stupidly in what might have been an attempt to keep him from speaking. Zalbag hadn’t actually understood quite what was expected of him, being only aware prior to that day of the passions between men in the abstract: as something he had been told was deeply abhorrent when it first put a name to his desires. He hadn’t wanted Wiegraf to tell him things though—to acknowledge what they were doing. Some part of him must have imagined the sin incomplete until named._

_Wiegraf was happy to keep kissing him, the stubble of his face grating against his skin as he ran a hand over Zalbag’s naked flank—as he continued to rut and writhe against him. When their lips next parted, it was much to Zalbag’s relief that Wiegraf said nothing as he trailed so many kisses down his naked frame, coming at last to his prick which he took in his mouth for a few shallow strokes as he fondled it._

_It was a lot for him. Zalbag had nearly come right then, and he must have looked it. Wiegraf laughed at him when their eyes next met. His face, his stomach, the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet: they all felt like fire as Wiegraf continued to lay his hands on him, stroking him in firm slow movements as he began to push back his legs._

_He remembered that Wiegraf looked as though he would ask him something but had stopped short. Zalbag had turned his gaze thereafter to the ceiling. He remembered that dizzying sense of apprehension and anticipation as he felt fingers, greasy with tallow or with oil, pushed into him—as he told himself that it would be impossible to back down. He thought the first few words of a prayer then, and let the rest of it fall away as Wiegraf began to fuck him—as he bit his cheek through the initial intensity of it and let himself be filled._

_Zalbag lay there without doing much of anything as he observed that everything in the room about him was very ugly. When Wiegraf told him in so many desperate, gasping pronouncements what a whore he was, he did not feel stung. He was achingly aware of his own body with every thrust, and it filled him with the sort of empty, animal nothingness that kept him from thinking about where he was to be tomorrow or whether anyone was to die. He rocked frantically to meet Wiegraf’s motions, giving out a stifled shout when he came abruptly in the midst of them. Wiegraf seemed barely to notice, and kept fucking him without pause, not taking the slightest interest in how pale his partner looked._

_When Wiegraf was finally done, Zalbag had not said anything that might give indication of his present mortification or of his prior inexperience. He had parted wordlessly to spend the day mismanaging more troops and choking on more prayers, and he did not speak to Wiegraf again until one of them found their way to the other to begin the whole cycle again._

  


~~~

  


Had Wiegraf been a wise man, he would have headed over the last crest into Fovoham and muddied who exactly had jurisdiction to hunt him down and hang him. He might have even had some small joy in imagining Zalbag spending another afternoon with Gerrith Barrington condescending to him as he tried to protest the necessity of his military decisions. Barring this, if he had merely been a good man, Wiegraf might have at least spent his time making some gesture—in prayer, in thought, or in action—as regarded his murdered sister.

Wiegraf had not done either of these things. Grief had been stupefying, he thought; it had made him too foolish to be solemn or sensible. They had circled the rim of the valley when the Northern Sky approached and then they had waited. His shoulder had swollen, and Tansa fretted that infection had set in, even if he weren’t yet feverish. He had propositioned her slightly after that, and she’d accepted. He was now reflecting on having spent the past half an hour fucking one of his subordinates. His sister dead, his men scattered, his body injured, and he had decided that the best use of his time would be to have an awkward throw with the girl who should have best known what a terrible idea it would be for him to fuck anybody.

It had—if nothing else—been an experience far-removed from fucking Zalbag Beoulve. Tansa knew what she was doing and was of a generally agreeable character. She had also never punched him. If he were to care about the particulars of sin, it was apparently a far lesser one to wantonly risk exposing her to the perils of childbirth and the vulnerabilities of motherhood than to find his pleasure in a body too like his own.

Wiegraf thought of Miluda almost forcibly, trying to recall if she had ever commented on this particular hypocrisy. He tried to recall her at all points really: in the thick of the battlefield, in those dimly recalled apparitions of their childhood home, in the few weeks prior when they’d come together again to plan out the strike. She had been very animated then, full of that hungry mania of somebody who could ill afford to rest. She had said she’d meet him again after her unit made it through the lowlands; it had all been very matter-of-fact.

The snow had been dissolving into slush and solidifying into ice all week, and Wiegraf wondered if the cold might have kept her body from decay these past few days—if there might be a chance he could recognize her if he managed to get back to where she’d fallen. He wondered if the Hokuten bothered to bury the dead these days—if the latest naïve youth to join House Beoulve’s ranks had the same unrelenting sense of religious terror his brother had and feared to keep a body from Faram’s soil.

He _must_ be feverish. His thoughts kept stumbling back to times and circumstances he knew he ought not dwell on. He wished he had the youthful stamina to find Tansa again and see if she would kindly seduce him out of reminiscences. He remembered when it had gone south far enough that Zalbag had first given the briefest word in acknowledgement of his fears.

_“Please burn me if I die. I don’t know how to ask anybody else.”_

Wiegraf, who was very much used to enjoying their arrangement in silence, had asked why, and immediately afterwards he recalled to himself the rumors that hungry men thought it unfitting that the dead should only feed the earth. He’d thought of telling Zalbag not to listen to hearsay. If anybody was godless and desperate enough to resort to cannibalism, the Dead Men would be the first, and he hadn’t come across any report that seemed genuine.

He’d also thought about telling him that he wouldn’t care about being eaten once he were dead; he’d thought of telling him that if Ajora hadn’t loved him enough to save him for his prayers and hadn’t hated him enough to smite him for his sodomy, the Saint probably couldn’t be bothered to bungle things more on account of some poor bastard descerating his remains by passing them through his guts.

He thought about telling him to shut up and not ruin the mood with his morbid sense of piety again.

Wiegraf became suddenly awake again to the present as he realized that there was smoke on the horizon. It did not quite register when Ariadna gave a shout. Somewhere in the distance, there was the crunching sound of talon falls. Somewhere beyond that, it was reported to him that Zeakden was burning.

He thought of Miluda, come back from the keep, a tiny portion of salt pork hidden in the sleeve of her shirt. He had interrogated her hard for it—warned her that the Grand Duke would not be kind to some peasant child filching his provisions. She had persisted in the flagrant lie that he’d let her have it, that the Weapon King had taken a passing fancy to her. When all had been dark, they had eaten the evidence together.

He thought of Miluda, drinking watered beer out in Dorter, telling him that Gustav was too lean to be trusted—telling him that they should go to ground and find means to weather the winter, that revolutions were best saved for spring. He thought of Miluda playing backgammon with Levine. He thought of Miluda caught up in the arms of one of a ragged boy, of a drunken man, of one of her girl priests. He thought of Miluda telling him to flee and be wise that he might not meet with a useless death.

Wiegraf ordered everyone to head to the cliffs overshadowing the encampment and get ready for a final stand. He touched the injury Ramza had gifted him and tried not to wince when it burned. He looked towards the horizon, tracing the funnel of smoke blooming into the sky, and waited to see if he could make out the shape of riders coming up the hill.


	5. Chapter 5

It was in the little space between the hill and the valley that Zalbag finally could think to what had just happened. Even with the urgency of the battle to come, he thought there might be some penance in dwelling on those things that should discomfit him most. Everything discomfited him, though. Everything was wrong. He turned within his thoughts like a leper driven to claw open his sores, like the flagellants who hoped to spare their flesh through ruining it.

He tried not to rationalize, but it became an inevitability. He had done as he had done as he had done before, and he would have to live on justifications going forward. He repeated to himself that Ivalice had never spared the innocent—that it had never spared anyone. He recalled all those times he prayed he should have the gift of martyrdom, as though dying in battle would efface his transgressions—as though his father might love him best as a corpse.

His bird must be tired. He was not. As the dohms passed quickly under them, Zalbag imagined how he would kill Wiegraf and be done with all of this. If he could push past guilt and become a man who ordered youth to their deaths, he could push past sentiment and kill a former lover. He envisioned the fight, the disarm, that solid feeling of a blade meeting flesh. Perhaps he would even have the good fortune for one of the gunners to take him out before their approach. Perhaps Wiegraf Folles should die without any sense of drama or momentousness. Perhaps he had died already, given over to injuries from a prior skirmish. There had been word of Ramza’s company sweeping north, and unlike Dycedarg, Zalbag felt their youngest brother capable of handling himself with a blade.

As another snow shower began to fall upon them—as it began to collect and turn the brown earth grey—Zalbag remembered unbidden how little anything at Riovanes had given evidence of human kindness, how quick fathers were to rob their children, how the call of every animal went quiet. He remembered how he had thought it fitting that Wiegraf should have bedded him in hatred and brought him into and out of each tryst with every mockery he could heap on him and on the divine. “ _God doesn’t care if you let yourself be buggered, Zalbag—God wouldn’t care for you if you burnt all of Fovoham to the ground on a lark.”_

When the ragged creatures finally descended from the hills to meet them, his mind was a near blank again. When he saw one figure rush out from amongst them all, his arm stiff and bent back as the other waved a sword out in front of him, Zalbag could not even bring himself to imagine his name.

His bird shrieked as something hit it. It fell, and Zalbag tumbled into the mud and slush, frantic as he charged recklessly forward and into the fray.

  


~~~

  


_There had always been one encounter that Wiegraf remembered in particular._

_Everyone had been packed into the keep by then. There was no inn to meet at. They had stolen away to the munitions tower, and it had gone as it had always gone. Zalbag had said nothing to acknowledge what was about to happen. Even once he was pushed up against the stone, Wiegraf hungrilly telling him every abasement he intended to put him through, he still didn’t meet his gaze. He only seemed to come alive under his hands when there was no possibility left that he should not fall: when he descended into that ecstasy of thinking himself damned._

_Wiegraf had tried that time to make him confess to it, to make him say out loud the sins they were about to commit. Zalbag had deflected—as he often did—by kissing him._

_It had been somehow less clumsy than it should have been. Wiegraf pushed the weight of his body against Zalbag’s, cupping his hands around his jaw to keep them locked together. He remembered thinking at that moment about all the little minutiae that still marked Zalbag as being set in the world above him, even so many days into the siege when he was as filthy and starving as anyone. He was still somebody used to having some man about to trim his beard and cut his hair. He was still somebody who was used to eating something better than coarse bread and pottage all his life._

_He realized later that he had always seen Zalbag as something like a figure out of a book. He was not quite like a painting or a statue—which are designed to be beautiful—but he was beautiful in the way that plain pictures are, having no flaws that aren’t put there by way of example. It all seemed a very philosophical distinction, and it was not one he had the head to make as a foolish boy of twenty. His thoughts then were that he’d come on something rarer than he’d get his hands on otherwise, and that he ought to enjoy it as best he could._

_They finally parted, and Zalbag looked up at him, wide-eyed and panting. Wiegraf feared for a moment that he was about to make some sort of insufferable objection that he ought repent his sins and never see him more. He kissed him again to preempt this._ _He closed his eyes and felt something slacken in them both when he did so._

_It was different than he had anticipated. He was used to having a visceral enjoyment at every point as to how he was putting General Beoulve’s son in his goddamn place. This time, Zalbag did not object when he paused—this time, Zalbag fell into place himself. He thought now and again, that it was even he who was being moved and Zalbag the mover. Zalbag was the one this time to pull him close, to strip the shirt from him. He clung to him as a dying man does to whatever is nearest him._

_“I know you know too. I know you know nobody’s coming for us,” Zalbag said breathlessly as he pulled off his own tunic. “There’s another week or two at most.”_

_Wiegraf didn’t say anything. He hadn’t known. When Zalbag embraced him again, he suddenly thought through the ethics of despoiling some pious idiot who thought it a great sin to die despoiled._

_It didn’t stop him; by the time that Zalbag Beoulve was naked and underneath him again, he doubted anything short of the Romandan army battering down the tower walls would. He held him fast against the floorboards, thinking of how this moment would be wholly lost soon—buried with them while the rest of Fovoham fled inland. The wavering shadows of the candlelight, the rapid fluttering of Zalbag’s pulse, the scent of yesterday’s rain still embedded in their skin: these would all be gone. Neither of them would be anything, and nobody would remember this._

_He took more time getting started than he usually did. For all he had fucked Zalbag Beoulve many times before this and intended to fuck him as often as was possible in the week or two they had left, Wiegraf found he knew very little about him. He prolonged things now, watching him react, watching him writhe as he pushed his legs apart and started trying to work him open. He wondered if they'd be in want of oil soon. He thought of all the improvisations he'd rather not turn to, recalling that long first winter after he'd enlisted when companionship had been a commodity very dear to the older soldiers._

_Zalbag seemed to look somewhere past the ceiling as Wiegraf slid the first finger into him, and Wiegraf wondered if it had always been so: if he had always cast his eyes to heaven in their couplings. As he felt him tense, he thought as to whether he had cast his there when somebody had first done him—back before he’d gotten over all the anxieties of law and religion. He brought his other hand over to stoke Zalbag in long, slow motions, paying attention as to when it was when his breath hitched in reaction, when his skin started to redden._

_When he started to push into him this time, it was very slow, as if he meant to savor the gradual degrees of change that came on from the act. Zalbag gasped very audibly as though he anticipated a violent start to things. It made sense—they had always been in some way violent with one another._

_Wiegraf kissed him a lot that time. In their next tryst, he would notice the skin of his neck and collarbone had bruised from it. He had wanted to say things he knew he oughtn’t say, and it was a means to stop his tongue before he said them. Zalbag had been full of a giddy eagerness that felt out of step with all their other couplings. He recalled how thin he felt—how much of him seemed now to be the jutting points of his ribs and hipbones. He recalled how he had called out his name more than once, how he had dug the tips of his fingers deep into the skin of his back._

_They came very close together this time, and for a few awkward moments afterwards, Zalbag still held him fast against him despite his attempts to get up. When the two of them finally came apart, neither said anything. They dressed quickly, as they always did, and Wiegraf prepared himself to head toward the strip of the great hall where his men lay huddled together for want of anywhere else to be._

_Looking behind him, however, he saw Zalbag, head in his hands as he leaned in partial collapse against the wall. He was clearly distraught, and Wiegraf thought for the most slender of moments to say something cruel. He did not. Instead, he moved to where he sat, and threw his arms around him—holding him while he shuddered. He felt a great lump in his throat that he knew must not turn to tears._

_Neither of them had uttered a word in the silence of that dying summer night, limbs wrapped around one another until they dissolved into sleep._


	6. Chapter 6

Wiegraf did not think of that evening when he saw Zalbag again, racing towards him with a drawn blade. Wiegraf thought about his dead sister and how he had to commit to either joining or avenging her. The sky was all smoke and snow, and all the noise of the world seemed to have fallen away into shouting. He knew—like as not—that this was the end of things—that he would die here and that the Death Corps would sink into the abyss of history alongside every other failed revolution. He tried to remember how sure of himself he’d sounded when he’d told Levine to take as many nobles as he could with him.

When Zalbag finally met him with a lunge, he had no idea how he’d managed to parry. His shoulder felt like it had a shard of hot glass in it. The potion hadn’t been enough. Tansa yelled something as one of the riders shot past him, and he lurched backwards as Zalbag made another swing for him.

It was barely a fight. Zalbag kept pressing forward, and Wiegraf kept stumbling about trying not to be run through. He wondered if it wasn’t a piece of theater that they should be pitted against one another now—if Zalbag had told his men to leave off so that he could have the glory of cutting down the leader of the Death Corps and saving Ivalice all over again. He thought of a great many bitter things he might say to him, but they could only serve to make his final moments all the more pathetic. When he met Zalbag’s gaze, there seemed little continuity between him and the boy he had known at Riovanes.

Wiegraf fought as best he could, and he knew he fought badly. Zalbag kept pushing him back, and he kept retreating, until he was pinned against a steep section of the hill with no recourse but to try something desperate or to die. Someone screamed as he made a fumbling thrust towards Zalbag and felt his sword topple into the snow. 

There was a long moment in which nothing happened. 

Zalbag did not run him through, for all that Wiegraf stood there in silence daring him to do so. The little cloud of his rasping breath seemed ill-fitted somehow to the frenzy of the battle around them. He saw his sword arm tense hard for a moment before Zalbag dropped his blade alongside his own.

Wiegraf fell to his knees. Zalbag knelt as if to meet him there. When they looked at one another now, it was clear where their thoughts lay.

“Go,” Zalbag whispered harshly, closing his eyes. “Please, just—”

Wiegraf didn’t let him finish.

The snow had begun to stick, and the blotch of red that fell from Zalbag’s gaping mouth was bright upon the ground for a moment before it dissolved. Wiegraf staggered backwards at the sight of it. 

He did not try to retrieve his blade from where it was now lodged in the man’s ribs. Neither did he have the presence of mind to scramble after the sword Zalbag had dropped. He ran, and when he heard a general clamor of the Hokuten crowding around their fallen general, he hoped wildly that he might just do as Zalbag had bid him and escape them all.

  


~~~

  


When Zalbag was finally carried home, he did not hesitate in telling Dycedarg the most basic facts of the botched mission. The little girl who had persisted so long as Alma’s shadow was slain. Ramza and his own shadow had disappeared. There would need to be some accounting made to the March of Limberry. He claimed responsibility for all this and for Wiegraf Folles’ escape, although on that last point he offered only the explanation that the man had fled after wounding him.

Dycedarg was very quiet in his anger. He did not need to say much to make it felt. Alma was far more direct. Zalbag resolved—quite rightly, he thought—to not to feel sorry for himself.

He did not—however—do as he surely ought do, and confess his lapse elsewhere. After having sought to free himself from the burden of bedding Wiegraf all those years prior, he could not bring himself to seek reconciliation for having spared him. He could undertake penance and pilgrimage for having murdered an innocent girl and ordered a foolish youth to his end; he could not atone for staying his sword from the man he hunted—for having betrayed those very deaths the instant his prize was in sight. If it was any consolation to Tietra Hyral, he had quite determined to let _that_ sin drag him down to hell.

He nearly went there too, in those first few days back at Igros. The injury had struck near to the heart, and it took a very accomplished chirurgeon to patch him back together. He fell into a fever soon after, and seemed to drift for several days into a stupor that made no distinctions between present and past. The domestics spoke in hushed tones as to what was to become of House Beoulve with all of its sons thus fallen, and Zalbag asked more than once after things which should no longer concern him: of the Grand Duke, of his father’s messengers, of Elidibus come out from the southlands like one of the Braves descending from paradise. Even as he began to recover his wits, all his dreams each night still turned to Riovanes.

One, in particular, beset him more than once in the long month that followed. He found himself awakening back on the hard oaken floor of a munitions tower, flung alongside so many emptied crates and cobwebs like a thing discarded. As he disentangled himself from the grip of the boy next to him, he recognized that he was being watched.

He sat up, and it happened in all his dreams as it had happened in the past. A slender child with dirt-flecked features and gold-red hair peered out at him from the crack of the door, her face sullen and pale in the growing daylight.

He had never really known what to make of Wiegraf’s sister all those years ago. He certainly hadn’t known what to make of her having discovered them thus.

When she walked into the room, she barely seemed to acknowledge him. She sank to her knees beside Wiegraf sometimes when he recalled her, at other times she merely stood over her brother with a tired look ill-fitted to her years.

Zalbag, whether in memories or in dreams, never knew what to do then.

She might have declared that she didn’t care what they did or did not do with one another. She might not have acknowledged her brother’s predilections at all. She might have said something withering or nonsensical or commented as to how they were daft to still be unaccounted for at this hour. Zalbag never offered any response, regardless of her words.

Always, however, when she finally turned to him, it was to make the same plea.

“Please be kind to him if you can,” she’d say wearily. “It would be good if one of us knew a little kindness before the end.”

  


~~~

  


Wiegraf did not find space to rest until he was many leagues north, well into the Fovoham brushlands and skirting the southern edge of the Yuguewood. When he finally collapsed, exhausted and aching, he lay in the low ditch into which he had fallen for a great long while. 

The next morning, when some farmer’s daughter came upon him, she took him for a corpse at first and quite nearly ran off in a stark terror before she saw his eyes were open and his face damp with weeping.


	7. Chapter 7

_It was the stupidest, most pathetic notion he had ever had, but Wiegraf sometimes remembered daydreaming that morning when he first woke up. Zalbag had been stretched out like some great cat in the little patch of sunlight that framed them, and Wiegraf thought that if they did not die, it would mean that the world had been set out of its natural order to grant men miracles. If something as absurd as their eleventh hour salvation came for them, why not take it further? Why not just tell the general’s son, heir to House Beoulve and its illustrious three centuries of history, that they had both been betrayed and ill-used and that it would be fair for them to desert—that they should go off together somewhere and let Ivalice keep killing her sons without them?_

_Why not just tell him they could leave?_

_And yet, as that fantasy of desertion had played through his head, in that mottled, dusty morning light, he could not bring himself to imagine what would happen after that. When he tried to envision where he would take Zalbag away to, his thoughts could not get farther than the room he was in: where two hungry, doomed boys had tried again to steal what comfort they could from one another’s bodies._

_It hit him again then: that sense that Riovanes would close around him like an open mouth—that unwavering conviction he had in those days that he must die there. He had given his ration to Miluda the night prior despite her protests that she was smaller and didn’t have to move about much. He was dizzy now that it was well past dawn._

_When Zalbag began to stir, he'd considered leaving. Instead, he’d watched him closely: the rise and fall of his chest, the swell of his throat as he swallowed, the sighing trill of his breath. He watched him until he laid down beside him again, and closing his eyes, he dragged Zalbag’s body against his once more, hoping foolishly that he would have no recollection of this moment when next he awakened._

**Author's Note:**

> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.
> 
> Thanks to I for the beta.


End file.
